Abalone part of lessons in classroom before release

The green abalone arrived in a box, and the seventh-graders took turns placing the iridescent, disk-shaped mollusks inside their new tank at Warner Middle School in Westminster.

"So you guys now are charged with taking care of the abalone," marine biologist Nancy Caruso told the class of 35 science students.

"It's your responsibility to empower yourselves and solve the problems the adults have caused," said teacher Travis Garwick.

The responsibility, and the problems, are quite real.

For several years, Caruso has been teaching middle-school and high school students how to grow ocean life-forms – kelp, abalone and white sea bass – in Orange County classrooms, sharpening their understanding of science, chemistry and even engineering.

But she recently received the news she had long awaited. The state Department of Fish and Game granted her a two-year permit to release as many as 200 classroom-grown, green abalone into the wild.

It is likely the only permit ever granted for the release of classroom-grown abalone.

So Caruso was busy distributing her shipment of farm-grown abalone to various classrooms this week, and Warner Middle School was the first on her list.

They'll remain in their carefully prepared tank, the students keeping strict control of environmental conditions, until their likely release off the Orange County coast in June.

"We're going to be raising abalone," student Nathan Cardenas, 12, explained to a visitor. "And we're going to be releasing them into the wild."

Seven species of abalone once were so plentiful on Southern California shores that their shells routinely turned up in gift shops, often for use as ash trays.

But avid fishing and human consumption, along with disease, caused their numbers to plummet.

A 1997 moratorium on abalone fishing, with the single exception of a recreational fishery north of San Francisco, has helped many species begin to recover, said Ian Taniguchi, a marine-region environmental scientist at state Department of Fish and Game.

Two abalone species, white and black, still are listed as endangered. Green abalone are listed as a species of special concern, and along the Orange County coast they exist only in pockets.

Caruso hopes to inspire a new generation of abalone experts while helping to repopulate the species off Southern California.

"Hopefully, in 30 years," she told the students, "you can sit down with your kids and say, 'The reason we're eating abalone is because we grew them in our classroom.'"